We provide direct estimates of how agents trade off immediate costs and uncertain future benefits that occur in the very long run, 100 or more years away. We exploit a unique feature of housing markets in the U.K. and Singapore, where residential property ownership takes the form of either...

This paper provides a dynamic rational expectations equilibrium model in which investors have heterogeneous information and investment opportunities. Informed investors privately receive advance information that is useful for predicting future earnings, but is unrelated to current earnings. This...

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

We study how actively managed equity mutual funds select the liquidity level of their equity portfolio and the effects of this selection on performance. We provide evidence of five key determinants of portfolio liquidity: portfolio size, portfolio concentration, the manager’s trading...

Many questions about institutional trading can only be answered if one can track high-frequency changes in institutional ownership. In the U.S., however, institutions are only required to report their ownership quarterly in 13-F filings. We infer daily institutional trading behaviour from the...

There is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets. In this paper we examine whether this predictability is related to expectational errors. To consider this issue, we use data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market, the foreign exchange...

The extreme levels of stock price volatility found during the Great Depression have often been attributed to political uncertainty. This Paper performs an explicit test of the Merton/Schwert hypothesis that doubts about the survival of the capitalist system were partly responsible. It does so by...

This paper reconsiders the role of foreign investors in developed country equity markets. It presents a quantitative model of trading that is built around two new assumptions about investor sophistication: (i) both the foreign and domestic populations contain investors with superior information...

We analyse the effects of insider trading on real investment and welfare, and the consequences of different regulatory policies: a disclose-or-abstain rule, ‘fair’ disclosure, laissez-faire and forbidding insider trades based on ‘precise’ information. We perform the analysis in a model...

The efficient markets hypothesis implies that, in the presence of rational investors, bubbles cannot develop. We analyse the trading behaviour of a sophisticated investor, a London goldsmith bank, during the South Sea bubble in 1720. The bank believed the stock to be overvalued, yet found it...